[Octave-patch-tracker] [patch #9633] Add test for correct exit status behaviour

[Karl Wette]

Follow-up Comment #1, patch #9633 (project octave):

(Apologies: the original submission had some formatting problems.)

I use Octave primarily as a command-line script interpreter (i.e. I run
executable scripts with #!/usr/bin/octave to invoke Octave) for scientific
applications on computer clusters. It is important for this application that
Octave conform to standard exit status behaviour:

* zero exit status is returned on success, either through normal completion or
by calling exit(0), and

* non-zero exit status is returned on failure, either through raising an
error() or by calling exit(n) with n != 0.

In Octave 4.2.2 the standard exit status behaviour was broken:

> $ octave --version
> GNU Octave, version 4.2.2
> ...
>
> $ echo '0;' > script.m; octave script.m; echo $?
> 0   # ok
>
> $ echo 'error("msg");' > script.m; octave script.m; echo $?
> error: msg
> error: called from
>     script at line 1 column 1
> 0   # should return not 0
>
> $ echo 'exit(0);' > script.m; octave script.m; echo $?
> terminate called after throwing an instance of 'octave::exit_exception'
> panic: Aborted -- stopping myself...
> Aborted
> 134   # should return 0
>
> $ echo 'exit(1);' > script.m; octave script.m; echo $?
> terminate called after throwing an instance of 'octave::exit_exception'
> panic: Aborted -- stopping myself...
> Aborted
> 134   # should return 1

However it seems to have been fixed recently in development:

> $ cat ./HG-ID
> 3d5f953e2ef6
>
> $ echo '0;' > script.m; ./run-octave script.m; echo $?
> 0   # ok
>
> $ echo 'error("msg");' > script.m; ./run-octave script.m; echo $?
> error: msg
> error: called from
>     script at line 1 column 1
> 1   # ok
>
> $ echo 'exit(0);' > script.m; ./run-octave script.m; echo $?
> 0   # ok
>
> $ echo 'exit(1);' > script.m; ./run-octave script.m; echo $?
> 1   # ok

I was unable to find a unit test for Octave's exit status behaviour, so the
attached patch adds such a unit test to ensure the exit status behaviour is
not broken in future. The patch adds a script ./test-octave-exit-status.sh
which runs Octave code snippets either as a script or using --eval, and then
tests Octave's exit status for the standard behaviour given above.

The script ./test-octave-exit-status.sh is called from "make check" before the
rest of the Octave test suite; a failed test in ./test-octave-exit-status.sh
will cause "make check" to fail; since the exit status tests are separate from
the rest of the Octave test suite, a silent test failure might otherwise go
unnoticed.


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